Fire! Three Case Studies in Ethics

On March 25, 1911, 146 people, mostly young immigrant women, working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in the garment district of New York City burned to death in 15 minutes, locked in their workrooms on the eighth and ninth floors of Manhattan's Asch Building. On November 28, 1942, nearly 500 people died in one of the United States' worst fires, at Boston's popular Cocoanut Grove night club. And on February 20, 2003, 100 people perished in another night club fire, in West Warwick, Rhode Island. This paper presents the cases, examines common threads, and addresses ethical considerations. These cases add a different dimension to studies in ethics: most students assume that we learn from past mistakes. What these cases provide, however, is an illustration of Hegel's frequently quoted comment that "we learn from history that we do not learn from history"